MAGNETIC MADNESS: THE CITIZEN KANES OF S.O.V.
SOV = shot on video, aka the only honest way to make a movie. Join us for four of the most unforgettable homemade trashterpieces of the camcorder era, each as titanic and influential in its own little world as CITIZEN KANE was in ours. Buy a ticket, explore a whole different kind of reality.
Films in this Program
Mark Polonia
John Polonia
Todd Michael Smith
60 minutes
The first full-length, shot-on-video (SOV) miracle from Mark and John Polonia (SPLATTER FARM, BAD MAGIC), HALLUCINATIONS is unlike anything you've ever seen. When teenage twin brothers (the Polonias) are left home alone with their friend (co-director Todd Michael Smith), they come face-to-face with a house full of phantasms. A kitten is mutilated by a chainsaw. A severed leg appears in a refrigerator. A Freddy Krueger-esque slasher shows up wearing an Adidas snowsuit. But the gross-out gags are slowly engulfed by sexual perversion, including bondage, genital mutilation, and a giant penis monster that lurks in the shower. Eerie, dream-like, and containing surprisingly mature themes, HALLUCINATIONS is easily one of the most important films in SOV horror history.
"Feels like a mutant three-way between David Cronenberg, Kenneth Anger, and Tex Avery in David 'The Rock' Nelson’s basement." — BLEEDING SKULL!
"Feels like a mutant three-way between David Cronenberg, Kenneth Anger, and Tex Avery in David 'The Rock' Nelson’s basement." — BLEEDING SKULL!
James Dillinger
95 minutes
Shot for $2000 on video by "James Dillinger" (aka author James Robert Baker) and produced by Los Angeles art collective EZTV, BLONDE DEATH is a savage blast of underground anarchy. The story follows the transformation of Tammy Lynn Beaverdorf (Sara Lee Wade) from bubbly teen to death-tripping speed freak—an in-your-face rampage of sex, drugs, and violence that climaxes with scenes that were secretly filmed inside Disneyland. Satiric, subversive, and gleefully enraged, BLONDE DEATH is an essential chapter of queer cinema history—now newly preserved by Bleeding Skull.
Alan Briggs
74 minutes
Written by producer Meg Shanks (who also owned the school that supplied the movie's child actors), SUFFER, LITTLE CHILDREN is one of the most unforgettable and immersive shot-on-video horror movies in existence. Combining exploitive "true crime" elements with a hallucinatory aesthetic, the movie purports to be a "recreation" of supernatural events that took place in August, 1984 at an orphanage in Surrey, England. Whether or not these events are true is a moot point. Banned during the UK's Video Nasty witch hunt and previously only available via VHS bootlegs, SUFFER, LITTLE CHILDREN is a true bludgeon to the brain -- now via Severin Films it's fully uncut and uncensored for the first time ever! (Severin)
"Feels like a group of new romantik punx hijacking some London church's VBS session to put on their own Satanic passion play, camcorder and two edit VCRs in hand. This sells itself as just being a 'reconstruction of real events,' but the third-gen tape dub scramble and the legitimately good kid actors make this seem more realistic than any recreation could ever hope to be. To say anything more would be to spoil just how insanely inventive and fun this is, but I will say that the final 20 minutes are pure video nirvana." - Liz Purchell
"Feels like a group of new romantik punx hijacking some London church's VBS session to put on their own Satanic passion play, camcorder and two edit VCRs in hand. This sells itself as just being a 'reconstruction of real events,' but the third-gen tape dub scramble and the legitimately good kid actors make this seem more realistic than any recreation could ever hope to be. To say anything more would be to spoil just how insanely inventive and fun this is, but I will say that the final 20 minutes are pure video nirvana." - Liz Purchell
Andrew Jordan
83 minutes
This movie is your new favorite drug. Somewhere in Canada, three friends arrive at a house in the woods to watch TV and drink beer. Little do they know that they've stepped into a black hole to another dimension, one that's dripping with giant mutant bugs, gore-soaked chainsaw battles, and violence against all forms of logic. No words can prepare you for THINGS. While watching this D.I.Y. non-sequitur from anti-reality, your central nervous system will be consumed by every emotion that's essential to being alive -- excitement, hilarity, outrage, fascination, confusion, repulsion, and exhilaration. If John C. Reilly as Dr. Steve Brule from CHECK IT OUT WITH DR. STEVE BRULE decided to make a hoser horror movie, it would be known as THINGS.
